On War & Stuff

Archive for July, 2011

My grandfather, who died in 1994 at the age of 92, was a life-long social democrat.¹ The son of a paper mill foreman and a veteran of three wars, he was a tough guy, both in body and spirit. He had the sinewy torso of a former wrestler and the voracious literary appetite of a self-taught working man. He had joined the socialist Red Guards at 16 in search of a job to provide for his family, had served as a machine gunner in the civil war in 1918 and after the defeat had nearly wasted away subsisting on bark and garbage in a prison camp. Still, he was passionately patriotic, and to show for his efforts in defending Finland against the Soviets in WWII he had a piece of shrapnel buried in his forehead. Despite all the hardship, or maybe because of it, he was a tolerant man, who showed great compassion for the needy and always rooted for the underdog regardless of his skin colour.

Were my grandfather alive today, his patriotic credentials would mean nothing to the True Finns, the populist, anti-immigrant party that won Finland’s parliamentary election in April with an unprecedented landslide.

For them, he would be enemy number 1, hated even more than Islam.

In fact, says True Finn MP James Hirvisaari, not only should leftists and Greens be opposed and fought against, they should all be prosecuted:

“It is time to sweep the political playing field clean and put things in the right perspective. And court-martial the nation’s traitors.”²

According to another True Finn MP, Jussi Halla-aho, a Helsinki University Slavic linguist who after 9/11 built a fanatical online following with his anti-multiculturalist, anti-Islam and anti-leftist blog, my grandfather wouldn’t even deserve to be called human:

“I find it difficult to imagine a lower form of reptile in the universe than the Scandinavian social democrat. A particularly slimy subspecies of this reptile is the Swedish social democrat.”

In another post, Halla-aho calls left-wing activists “human scum” and expresses regret that “in the current media climate” the police are not allowed to shoot them in the head:

“What does a fish do? It swims. How do you stop a fish from swimming? You kill it. What does a leftist hooligan do? He throws rocks. How do you stop a leftist hooligan from throwing rocks?”

As for the enemy’s women, they deserve to be raped by the Muslim immigrants they befriend:

“The number of rapes will increase no matter what. Because more women will be raped in any case, I sincerely wish that the predators who randomly choose their prey will pick the right women. Greenish-leftist do-gooders and their voters. Better them than someone else.”

Halla-aho, who is a gun enthusiast, says he is a peaceful man who has never condoned violence, much less advocated it. Yet, after being offered a blowjob by a homosexual in 2003, he wrote:

“[…] I thought for a moment whether I should go upstairs, get a gun and shoot him in the head. Would the resulting bliss be so great as to outweigh the upset over a jail sentence? These days violence is an underrated method for solving problems.”

Four years later, after his first bid for parliament had failed, Halla-aho again confessed to having homicidal thoughts as he explained why he would not intervene if he saw a woman being raped by an immigrant:

“I would not in the least want to risk a situation where I would have to pay damages for ‘pain and suffering’ to some piece of human filth from the Horn of Africa. In such a situation I can well imagine losing my self-restraint and killing both the judge and the piece of filth with his ‘pain and suffering’, along with his lawyer.”

Spanning almost a decade, Halla-aho’s writings would be a treasure trove for those wanting a glimpse of the evolution of a Scandinavian right-wing Islamophobe³ — except that there isn’t much in the way of evolution.

Even after Halla-aho’s political success, first in the 2008 municipal election and later in the national race of 2011, the violent imagery persists. Enemies — never explicitly called so but treated with resentful suspicion and contempt — include the left, the Greens, the media, the multiculturalists, the Minister of Immigration, the state prosecutor’s office, immigrant bus drivers and anyone else standing in the way of what is dear to Halla-aho and his 15,074 voters.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Halla-aho is approvingly quoted in 2083, the 1,500-page political manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year old Norwegian right-wing Islamophobe who last week killed 76 people in Oslo in the first successful terrorist attack in the West since the London bombings by Muslim extremists in 2005.

What is surprising, however, is that so many people who should know better have been appalled by what they call a “deranged” and “rambling” compendium, and are utterly baffled by the targeting of social democrats instead of Muslims, when much of the same thinking, often in the exact same words, has been accessible online for years.

For those who have read Halla-aho’s writings, or similar Finnish blogs like Vasarahammer or Laiva on lastattu — or the 2009 Finnish extremist manifesto Operaatio Ulos! (‘Operation Out!’) which calls for the mass murder of the “multi-culturalist elite” in much the same way that Breivik does — the only shocking thing about the Oslo killer’s ideas is that they sound so familiar.

But does it follow from any of this that Halla-aho, Hirvisaari and their ilk in Finland or abroad should bear any responsibility for Breivik’s actions?

Well, here’s the thing:

As much as my grandfather would’ve enjoyed watching Halla-aho nosedive down the toilet with a horribly painful political ass-bleed, I’m almost certain he couldn’t have brought himself to blame the guy for some other dude’s atrocity.

Does this mean he would’ve given peddlers of hate speech a free pass? Hell no. Just because he wouldn’t have blamed Halla-aho, Spencer, Geller et al. for the shots Breivik fired doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have blamed them for writing and saying what he most certainly would’ve considered stupid fucking shit.

It also doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have held Halla-aho responsible for letting loose online trolls who have hastened the atrophying of public debate in Finland by harassing any forum or individual deemed too “tolerant”, to the extent that Halla-aho’s political opponents now have to take up nonsensical positions just to keep the horde at bay.

And it doesn’t mean my grandfather wouldn’t have blamed True Finns party chief Timo Soini, who is fully aware of Halla-aho’s views on violence as a problem solver, for awarding him with the chairmanship of the parliament’s Administration Committee, which is in charge of immigration and gun laws — and letting him keep the post even after his cogitations were endorsed by a mass murderer.

But at the end of the day, I think it is more likely that my grandfather, as was his wont, would’ve just pulled out his trusty ballpoint pen, found Halla-aho’s picture in the morning paper and unceremoniously drawn a cross over it.

And that would’ve been that.

¹ I’m not.

² Links are available on request. I don’t want stormtroopers trashing my blog.

³ Halla-aho doesn’t like to be called anti-immigration or Islamophobe and is bound to take great umbrage. What can I say — knock yourself out.

Had he been a Somali immigrant named Mohammed, it is doubtful that Anders Behring Breivik would have ever gotten as far as he did. It is more than likely, though not certain, that he would’ve been flagged by the Norwegian PST as a security risk a long time ago, stopped from acquiring his tools of murder and promptly deported.

But had Mohammed succeeded against the odds in realising his grisly dream, we would find ourselves living in a very different Scandinavia. We would be grappling with a rising tide of anti-Muslim violence. “Anti-multiculturalist” ideologues would churn out ever more vitriolic blog posts denouncing the immigration policies of their “traitorous” governments; those already voted to power would use their bully pulpits to rally kindred souls across political lines. Populist parties with anti-Islam agendas thinly disguised as “anti-immigration” would grow ever more powerful. The vocabulary of xenophobic hate speech would continue to permeate the national discourse, and no one would dare to challenge those encouraging it, for they would now be the majority.

Mohammed himself would be fair game for speculation and innuendo. His religious beliefs and ideological background would be probed, examined, analysed, mulled over and written about endlessly. Any connection, however tenuous, with radicals in other countries would be exploited to sell newspapers, discredit political opponents and pour scorn over his religion. Every detail of his online existence would be combed for more evidence of his radicalisation; after all, people would say, terrorists don’t grow in a vacuum.

In the end, everyone would agree that Mohammed was crazy — and not just any kind of crazy, but a crazy Muslim. And no one would think he was a loner. These fanatics never are, people would say — there’s always some hate-spewing bigot somewhere egging them on.

And the big question, after all the pondering and analysing and mulling-over, would not be “what made Mohammed a psychopath” but “what kind of a religion makes someone that way”.

The other day, a total stranger — a man whom I have never met and who knows nothing about me or my views — angrily called me out on Twitter for pointing out yet another occurrence of the “islamists are taking over the uprising in Libya” fantasy meme:

It isn’t a *meme*; it was something blithely ignored by you crazy interventionists with blood rushing to your head in March.

After promptly blocking the dude (I don’t respond well to name calling¹), I started thinking. An interventionist? Is it possible to be one without knowing it?

I’ve always considered myself quite the opposite. I’ve been a skeptic of the NATO campaign in Libya and a critic of the war effort in Afghanistan; I opposed the Iraq war from the start; and I think I’m as anti-war as anyone who has spent a career watching people suffer and perish in actual, you know, real life.

But I also value honesty, and I’ve had a hard time hiding my disgust with the disingenuousness and, in some instances, outright trollish behaviour of some of the Libya intervention’s most vocal opponents, many of whom I respect and admire as experts in other fields.

As I have tried to point out elsewhere, there is little evidence to support their pet memes — international jihadists taking political advantage of the upheaval, local rivalries sparking a tribal conflagration, “pervasive” human rights abuses by the rebels, and so on. No amount of name calling or “these go to eleven” type of argumentation will change this. And playing fast and loose with the facts doesn’t help solve the Libyan imbroglio. If anything, it distracts from the real challenges facing the post-war government, such as guaranteeing due process, disarming local militias and reintegrating the brutalised youngsters now fighting Gaddafi.

I also have a primal dislike for double standards. It boggles my mind, for example, how someone who writes blog posts decrying civilian casualties in Afghanistan (about 1,400 this year) can dismiss the death toll in Misrata (about 1,200 since February) as insignificant. Or how someone who takes umbrage when Afghans are summarily blamed for their country’s woes can call the Libyan NTC “thugs” without a shred of proof. Or how the same people who write off Al Qaeda in Pakistan as a spent force suddenly claim that a bunch of unshaven chins in Libya are an existential threat. Or how experts who meekly accept Taleban assurances that they are completely separate from Al Qaeda refuse to accept the Libyan rebels’ word for anything.

Or — and this really gets my goat — how the area experts who hated it when pundits started making pronouncements about Afghanistan with total disregard for scholarly opinion now pull the same crap on real experts on Libya.

So, okay — if calling out guys like that makes me an interventionist, hell, I’m proud to wear the label.

As for the actual military intervention in Libya, I remain doubtful. But I guess that’s beside the point.

Libya has all the makings of a prolonged, uncontrolled tribal war similar to Somalia where groups are likely to link up with elements of Al Qaeda like AQAP and AQIM for support towards taking political control once Gaddafi is removed.

Libya is also emerging as the new nexus in North Africa for Al Qaeda, and anyone who says otherwise is ignoring how that fight against Al Qaeda is the fight everyone knows is coming after Gaddafi loses power.

Libya looks more and more like the next Somalia every day. We are removing Gaddafi only to have to remove Al Qaeda later. […] AQIM influence grows.

His sources?

[…] NATO, Pentagon, and others. It is fairly consistent concern in virtually all intel circles I speak to.

So which is it, I asked him, is the influence of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb actually growing in Libya in some measurable and documentable way, or is this merely a concern, as in “officials in Stockholm are concerned that Al Qaeda influence is growing in Sweden”?

Alas, no answer.

So let me get this straight. There’s this mega-secret hivemind — so secret, in fact, that you’re only allowed to use its whisperings to sucker-punch skeptics on Twitter — and because it thinks Libya might one day become a terrorist-infested wasteland, we can now all call it, without a shred of evidence, “the new nexus in North Africa for Al Qaeda”?

Yes, apparently we can. Of course, by the same token we could also call Sweden the new AQ nexus in Europe. But never mind.

Just for fun, let’s look at that quote again, with emphasis added:

Libya is also emerging as the new nexus in North Africa for Al Qaeda, and anyone who says otherwise is ignoring how that fight against Al Qaeda is the fight everyone knows is coming after Gaddafi loses power.

Yep. That’s a baseless assertion based on a baseless assertion. “I say this is true, and I know it is true because I am right.” Even Gaddafi couldn’t have put it better (although he has tried).

I’m not saying it isn’t possible that at some future point some terrorist organisation will try to insert itself into the war in Libya, or, indeed, that something like that isn’t already taking place.

It’s just that there isn’t any robust open source data to support the claim. Yes, desperadoes from Darnah became suicide bombers in Iraq in 2005-2007, but that doesn’t mean those men — much less Al Qaeda — are now heading the fight in Libya. Yes, NATO commander Stavridis has hinted at “flickers of Al Qaeda” among the Libyan opposition; but he has also admitted he has “no details of a significant Qaeda presence”. Oh, and yes, there is this Daily Telegraph story, based on an article in the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, that surfaces on Twitter every time a pundit wants to argue that the West has been duped into supporting a horde of homicidal hipsters.

But what about AQIM, the Salafist hellhounds “we” are supposed to “remove” after Gaddafi falls? As usual, real experts are reluctant to go along with the hype. According to Andrew Lebovich, a researcher at the New America Foundation, even if AQIM has actually managed to grab weapons and explosives from Libya, the organisation is probably more interested in defending its home bases in Niger and Mali against Western special forces than getting mixed up in someone else’s revolution:

This incident provides more evidence that, rather than seeking to run the revolt in Libya (as some members of the U.S. security establishment and Congress seem to want to believe), AQIM is using the chaos there to take what it can, before retreating to Algeria or Mali. No one has provided any indication that more than two or three AQIM members are entering Libya at any given time, and while they could be making contacts with rebels or other assorted jihadists for the purpose of fighting, it is just as likely that they are scouting the terrain, or laying the groundwork for other smuggling convoys.

Sadly, the “Libya will be the next Qaeda Emirate” story is just one of many fantasy memes currently spreading through the Googleverse.

Another popular one, also initially put forth by Gaddafi, is the doomsday scenario about the war degenerating into a tribal holocaust. Again, such a tragedy is not inconceivable, and as the rebels capture more loyalist towns, eyewitness accounts of targeted reprisals have started to appear. Still, there is no evidence of widespread tribal violence.

That didn’t stop analysts critical of the NATO intervention from jumping at a Wall Street Journal story about the old animosity between Misrata and Tawergha. The piece, by Sam Dagher, never mentions actual violence, and it certainly doesn’t say anything about ethnic cleansing. Yet, as if by magic, the word “vengeance” started cropping up in articles quoting the story, with one normally astute observer calling the Misrati tough talk an “eruption” that is “consuming” the city, claiming that “ethnic violence” is now taking place, and finally warning that Libya may turn into “a nation of Misratas”. (A puzzling notion to those of us who have been afraid of the very same thing but for totally different reasons.)

What puzzles me is not the yawning gap between analysis and reality. It’s the bloodthirsty glee with which pundits, particularly Americans, pounce on any morsel of news that might show the Libyan uprising in an unflattering light, be it AQ influence, tribal vendettas or extra-judicial violence (by default, the rebels are assumed to be the executioners). It’s almost as if the misadventure in Iraq and the bungling of Afghanistan have left the analysts in permanent snark overdrive, wishing ill on everyone and finding disaster where it hasn’t yet happened, to hell with facts.

BBC and Reuters report that the rebels in Misrata have managed to advance from the previous western frontline in Dafniya and are consolidating their positions at Souq al-Thulatha’a 13 kilometres from Zliten, the next city along the road to Tripoli.

Lest anyone gets any big ideas about a blitzkrieg straight to the hornet’s nest, let’s have a reality check:

The fighters captured Dafniya on May 10, two months ago today. Since then they have pushed towards Zliten several times, only to be thrown back badly mangled. If — and that’s a big clump of if — they succeed in holding onto their newly fortified position at the souq and it becomes the new frontline, it would mean that they have advanced at an average rate of approximately 160 metres a day. By my count, it will take them a little less than three years to reach Tripoli. And that’s not counting the inevitable fight over Zliten, which will stall them for days if not weeks. There is talk of “special forces” being ferried across the Gulf of Syrt from Benghazi, but it is unclear who exactly they are and what their role might be once they reach Misrata.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. I’m just as fond of the brave and ingenious Libyans as all the other journalists who have spent time with them on the frontlines. Dislodging a siege army from the heart of your city using only your wits, some ancient AKs and a few dump trucks is a feat only the gutsiest can pull off.

But Misrata’s fighters are not an army, they’re a home guard — masters at urban warfare but ill-equipped to maneuver in the open. It does no one any good to pretend that saving their homes from an invader means they can beat him on his home turf, or to claim, as some well-meaning observers have done on Twitter, that they have already taken Zliten or Tawergha. Maybe some day they will; until then, the best one can hope for is that they can at least keep their own families beyond rocket range.

The prospects of Muammar Gaddafi’s army collapsing are “highly unlikely”, a senior defector, Col. Mohammed Ali Ethish, tells The New York Times:

“I hope that when we do reach the borders of Tripoli, the revolutionaries there free it. […] If we don’t go in with an organized army, there’s going to be a huge mess.”

I doubt the rebels will get even that far. The war in Libya is unlikely to end in a slugfest over the capital. In fact, unless the Gaddafi regime somehow implodes, which probably won’t happen since it hasn’t already, the war is unlikely to end at all in the near future. Sitting comfortably in his family compound of Bab al-Azizia, Gaddafi has had 42 years to spread his ideology, consolidate his power and, most importantly, to prepare for his own death struggle.

Anyone who visits the battlefields of Libya will sooner or later come across two puzzling and worrisome sights: mounds of empty ammunition crates and slogans scrawled on walls. The first is a grim reminder of the fact that no matter how puny his army may seem on the pages of Jane’s, Gaddafi has had four decades to spend his oil money to buy arms and ordnance, which he will employ in defense of his last stand. But the graffiti is even more disturbing. An army that paints “Allah, Muammar, Libya — nothing else” on the walls of every farm house it occupies doesn’t strike me as exactly non-committal. Someone took the time, between unloading the ammo and setting up the Grad launchers, to actually get some paint and write that slogan. We may laugh at the ramshackle, DIY nature of Gaddafi’s jamahiriya, but it would serve us well to remember that not everyone in Libya thinks it’s a joke.

Gaddafi is not an accidental dictator who secretly thinks of himself as a reformer and is shocked when the mob inevitably arrives at the palace gates. He is hard core — defiant, vengeful and unperturbed by the bloodletting. By all accounts, including my interviews with survivors in Benghazi and Misrata, and documents in possession of the International Criminal Court, the brutal response of his security forces to the first demonstrations in February was pre-planned and well rehearsed. He knew the day would come and he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. His “zenga, zenga” speech may have been bluster, but people in the east believed he was dead serious, and they were mortified. They know their leader, they told me, and he would rather destroy Libya than let go of it.

The war has so far defied analogies (just because dudes have beards doesn’t mean it’s the next Somalia; more on this later), but in one respect Libya may yet come to resemble post-Saddam Iraq. It is not inconceivable, looking at the absolute ruthlessness of Gaddafi’s army, that he has already planned a bloody coda to his rule — a loyalist insurgency with the aim of giving him the last laugh and making his creation a failed state.

When I was in Misrata in May, there were still drag marks on the sidewalk outside a car wash at the end of Tripoli Street, where shrapnel from a mortar shell had hit photographers Tim Hetherington, Chris Hondros, Guy Martin and Michael Brown in the early evening of April 20. Next door was the burned hulk of Al-Beit Beitak, or The Home is Yours, a furniture store where Hondros and Brown had photographed rebels flushing out Gaddafi’s snipers earlier that day.

This is the last street corner before the overpass to Misrata airport, a spot that was, in the words of another journalist who was in the city that day, “way, way out there”. In fact, the photographers had passed what little front line there was and were under fire from at least two directions. According to Brown, things were getting “too sketchy”, and the men were about to head back when the shell exploded. The impact crater I found some 20 metres from the bloodstains was small, but since the sidewalk is concrete, the hail of shrapnel must have been horrendous. Martin and Brown suffered serious injuries; Hondros and Hetherington did not survive.

Why were they there? I find this question a little strange, particularly coming from fellow journalists, as it implies that, since there was fierce fighting all along Tripoli Street that day, they could have somehow accomplished the same by risking less. It also suggests that they made the beginner’s mistake of not paying attention to one’s surroundings and ventured too far. That may be true — it’s all too easy to wander past one street corner too many in the confusing battlefields of Libya. But documenting wars, whether by pen or camera, has never been a business where you carefully set goals and then try to reach them by expending as little of your luck as possible. In fact, it’s wasteful as hell. Often you have to roam far and wide just to witness one brief moment that may later prove significant but probably won’t. You’re not looking for the generic; you’re looking for the one-time only. That is why, to be able to shoot his pictures of the battle for Al-Beit Beitak, Chris Hondros needed to be right there at the end of Tripoli Street that day. The events were unique. They were there to see the tree fall.

There is a tendency, at least where I live, to ascribe ulterior motives to almost anything that journalists do. Sure, there are plenty of self-aggrandising dabblers around; and I’m pretty certain most of us have at some point been driven by greed or ambition or a pure, blind lust for thrills. But as motives go, simply wanting to see, “feeling the need to go with it”, as Brown says, is noble enough for me.

There are no heroes in our line of work; some just master the craft better than others. Here’s to you, guys.